Melodic cues to 'finality' in discourse units

Among the possible functions of speech melody is its capacity to signal different sorts of relationships between utterances that build a discourse unit. Pitch may indicate, for example, whether a current utterance is likely to be the last one in a sequence of statements. Spontaneous speech was elicited by having subjects describe a path through a spatial network, containing geometrical figures, some of which were identical in form, but occurred in different positions (among which is the final one in the trajectory). Perceptual tests brought to light that listeners can identify the utterances in accordance with their structural positions in the spontaneous descriptions and that the pitch contours may indeed contain cues to those perceivable distinctions. The communicative relevance of pitch for signalling ‘‘finality’’ was then further investigated in perceptual experiments. It was revealed that, in pairwise comparisons, ‘‘finality’’ judgments can be significantly influenced by the following variables: the direction of the utterance-final-pitch change, the relative size of the pitch movements, the position of the contour in the speaker’s pitch register, and the type of ‘‘hat pattern’’ used

On-line spotting of ASR errors by means of prosody

Given the state of the art of current speech technology, errors are unavoidable in present spoken dialogue systems. Therefore, one of the main concerns in dialogue design is how to decide whether or not the system has understood the user correctly. We identify methods to distinguish between correctly and incorrectly recognized utterances, scored by hand for semantic concept accuracy, using acoustic/prosodic characteristics. The analysis was performed on data collected during independent experiments done with an interactive voice response system that provides travel information over the phone

Prosodic predictors of discourse finality in spontaneous monologues

This article reports on a study of the capacity of prosody to predict upcoming discourse boundaries. More specifically, it is investigated whether the approaching end of a route description can be pre-signalled by melodic and temporal characteristics. Experiment 1 brings to light that listeners are able to estimate on the basis of such prosodic properties how far a given utterance is situated from the end of a description. However, the scope of this prosodic prediction is relatively restricted as listeners can only estimate the absolute discourse position of the last two utterances of the monologue analyzed. Experiment 2 is run in order to explore systematically, by means of a test with synthetic speech, to what extent melodic and durational properties are sufficient to influence finality judgments

Echoing in Japanese conversations

The study reported in this paper focuses on different functions of echoing in Japanese dialogues. Echoing is defined as a speaker's lexical repeat of (parts of) an utterance spoken by a conversation partner in a previous turn. The phenomenon was investigated in three task-oriented, informal dialogues. Repeats in this corpus were labelled in terms of whether or not the speaker had integrated the other person's utterance into hislher own body of knowledge. The investigation brought to light that the level of integration is reflected in a number of lexical and prosodic correlates. These features are discussed regarding their information potential, i.e., their accuracy and comprehensiveness as signals